Leeds Philatelic Society



Artists and Designers for some Stamp Issues

Introduction


Background


John Waddington & Co was founded in the 19th century as a producer and printer of playing cards based in Leeds. Over the years since they diversified into producing and printing board games and other similar products.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s the firm of John Waddington Security Print Ltd in Leeds was responsible for the design and printing of stamps for many British Commonwealth countries and a few foreign countries. During this time, they took over Questa, but were eventually split up and sold.

Waddington never made public the names of the designers of the stamps they produced. But the artists who designed the stamps kept a record of the stamps they designed in albums with copies of the stamps attributed to the designers in roughly chronological order of the date printed. This is probably the only surviving record of the names of the designers of stamps produced by Waddington.

The collection finished up in store in the premises of the Contego Packaging Group in Leeds where it remained undiscovered for several years. The Society was approached in 2011 by the Company and offered the collection (in 9 volumes) because of its local historical interest before consigning it to the local rubbish tip. Naturally the Society accepted it.



Development Work

The Society decided to produce a comprehensive list of the stamps in these volumes. This list would include: -
* The country issuing the stamps;
* The date the design of the stamps was submitted (if recorded in the volumes);
* The date of the issue of the stamps - retrieved from SG catalogues;
* The SG catalogue numbers for the stamps;
* The names of the artists engaged in the design of the stamps; and
* Any differences in the design work recorded in the SG catalogues.

Once the work was finished, then the details would be shared with Stanley Gibbons to support their work in future catalogue development.

Initially the work was started by John A Edwards FRPSL. He has been helped recently by Richard Smith and Derek Baron - both members of Leeds Philatelic Society.

Volumes

The stamps are mounted in 8 volumes labelled volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and Queen Elizabeth’s 25th Anniversary of her Coronation and the 85th Birthday of the Queen Mother. Volume 5 was never presented to the Society. Volumes 1 to 7 are arranged in alphabetical order of countries.

An index and contents list have been constructed for each volume. A complete index (using Excel) for all the stamps has been produced to enable members to interrogate the index and gather information on designers.

Scans and all information have been stored digitally and is available to members with a USB memory stick.

Richard Smith
2019



These initial notes were written by John A Edwards FRPSL when the Waddington Collection was displayed at the Philatelic Congress in Leeds in 2015
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